When Cincinnati startup ReadySet Surgical announced its $5.5 million Series A on March 23, the world looked quite different than day one of fundraising. The company creates vendor management systems to help hospitals control their supply chains. Their software tracks critical inventory of items like surgical implants and durable medical equipment.
But Covid-19 regulations put elective surgeries on hold, and like many health care companies, this pause impacted ReadySet Surgical’s bottom line.
“Our technology looks at the surgical schedule of hospitals, and we saw a precipitous drop off of surgeries where we went from around 3,000 surgeries per month that required implants to around 700 in one hospital, and those were [critical] trauma procedures,” said Keerthi Kanubaddi, ReadySet Surgical founder and CEO.
With demand shifting, Kanubaddi and his teams switched gears by adjusting their current software to help hospitals where they need it most: ventilator fleet management.
“With so many companies creating ventilators right now, they don’t all come with instructions for use and set up,” Kanubaddi said. “That’s what our technology does. It allows hospital systems to create an asset tag for any ventilator.”
Hospitals can scan the tag with a smartphone or computer to see instructions for ventilator set up instructions, maintenance cycles, disinfection cycles, and vent management. Since health care organizations are already stretched financially, they don’t have budget for new tracking technology, Kanubaddi said. That’s why ReadySet Surgical is offering this ventilator management platform free of charge.
“We feel responsible to help, so we got together to think about what we could do for the health care organizations,” he said. “Then, we dropped everything we were doing to focus on [adjusting this platform]. It’s the fastest deployment we’ve had in the history of our company.”
This speed would’ve likely been impossible for ReadySet Surgical when it launched five years ago. Then, the company had two employees: Kanubaddi and his chief technology officer. Now, ReadySet has 24 employees and two offices (Cincinnati and San Diego), with over 100 hospitals under contract — not to mention a $5.5 million Series A, which included investors like Jumpstart Inc. (the lead investor), as well as CincyTech, Queen City Angels, Northcoast Ventures, and Kinetic Ventures, according to Kanubaddi.
So what’s ReadySet Surgical’s key to success? Helping hospitals cut unnecessary and unexpected expenses, Kanubaddi says. He spent years working for medical technology companies, and this experience opened his eyes to a gap in the market.
“ReadySet is hitting on an area that’s ripe for disruption,” he said. “We’ve proven we can ensure hospitals that they will not get billed for something that was not contracted or not supposed to be there. We have major medical device manufacturers now approaching us asking how they can tie back into our platform.”
